Preserving Web-based Auction Catalogs at the Frick Art Reference Library

The Frick Art Reference Library (FARL) has a collection of over 90,000 auction catalogs and they are one of the most requested resources at the library, as more auction houses are publishing on-line. FARL began the "Reframing Collections for a Digital Age" project to address the stability of born-digital art research materials. The first phase of the project identified the basic risks and determined that Archive-It software was the best means of capturing this information. The second phase, described in this paper, identified criteria to determine preservation priorities and evaluate what has already been captured by the Internet Archive, with the goal of creating a list of websites that can and should be harvested immediately. The study also examined the pilot seed crawl results which monitor quality of materials being collected.